A while back, I was chatting with a close mom friend when she referenced her first husband.

“Right,” I nodded. “Your first husband.”

She had a first husband?

Should I have known that? Did I know that, and space out the fact somewhere between buying my tween wide-leg jeans and binging The Bear?

But, no. Though we’d spent countless birthday parties, beach days and even grown-up dinners together, we had never gone there. And I guess, by now, she’d forgotten what she had and hadn’t shared.

The more I thought about it, the less surprising it seemed. After all, when we meet as parents, at least initially, we present mostly sanitized versions of ourselves. We want to appear solid, trustworthy, like upright citizens, always at the ready with organic snacks. We swap anecdotes about the best dance and theater classes, teachers and math curriculum—even parenting fails.

But past lives as club kids and potheads, past relationships with discarded first husbands, past romantic dalliances? Not so much.

All that fun stuff is sort of off-limits.

My fascination with that concept—the juxtaposition between the different versions of ourselves, what we choose to present and, alternatively, bury—is at the heart of my choice to include a third narrator in my new book, Pick-Up, a contemporary romance that revolves around parents at school drop-off and pickup (and then meanders to a private Caribbean island). The book features the voices of the two love interests, Sasha and Ethan, and then Kaitlin, who is essentially a social voyeur from Sasha’s present and past.

I first had the idea for Pick-Up while lingering outside my kids’ elementary school after drop-off with a group of parent friends, discussing the dearth of decent scandal at our school. We were all so well behaved! Or so it appeared.

I myself became a parent while living in Brooklyn, only a mildly inconvenient, if not foul-smelling, subway ride away from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where I grew up. But because I spent the intervening years living in Los Angeles, when I returned and had kids, my two worlds of high school friends and parent friends remained distinctly separate.

But what if, I began to imagine, my two worlds collided? What if someone here knew who I was before—and had opinions about my then and now?

When we begin new stages of our lives, we are often presented with the opportunity to reinvent ourselves, both for appearances and authentically. That is, unless there’s someone around to remind us, even peripherally, of who we were. Someone who we may feel not only judging us for our current decisions, but also seeing us through the lens of a previous incarnation of ourselves.

Are they seeing us more or less clearly?

Throughout Pick-Up, when she’s not arguing with Ethan, Sasha begins to open her eyes to how her identity has morphed over the years, for the better and worse. So, in some ways, the character of Kaitlin becomes not only an observer of Sasha’s story, but also Sasha’s own shadow self, an example of what happens when we allow ourselves to be so weighed down by our past self-concepts that we convince ourselves we are failing in our present.

Classically in romance, there are—of course—two players who fall in love. But maybe, if we dig a little deeper, there are actually myriad characters who have their own valid versions of our main characters’ stories: the friends, the enemies, the onlookers, the interlopers, even the past versions of the characters themselves.

Photo of Nora Dahlia by Rich Wade.

For someone who only went to one school dance, I can’t seem to stay away from them in my books. Almost all of my characters go to prom. (Or homecoming. Or, in the case of my British characters, a leavers’ ball.)

In my new novel, Slow Dance, a flashback to prom sets the stage for the grown-up love story at the heart of the book—seeing the main characters all dressed up at 18 tells you everything you need to know about them at 33. 

I love writing about prom.

I also love writing about weddings. And Christmas dinners. And first days of school.

Shiloh, one of the main characters in Slow Dance, would be very disdainful of this. Prom is a false holiday, she’d say. (Holidays are false holidays, according to Shiloh. She’s a skeptic.) She refers to prom as a bundle of meaningless traditions that produce manufactured sentiments.

“It’s just a ritual,” Shiloh says in the book. And Cary, her best friend and the boy she’s secretly in love with, replies, “Rituals are all we have.”

I started out a Shiloh. But I’ve become a Cary.

As you get older, you realize that red-letter days are few and far between. Birthdays feel smaller every year—and almost nothing calls for ceremony. (There’s a real ceremonial dry spell between your wedding and your funeral, and the latter will be wasted on you.) As an adult, you almost never get really dressed up to commemorate the beginning or end of something. You almost never have an excuse to wear flowers. The days start to run together. . . . Without any rites, time is just passage. 

Prom, even more than graduation, is the American coming-of-age ritual. And I say this, knowing that many, if not most, prom experiences suck! Prom has everything: music, costumes, girls holding hands and crying. Prom is one of the only production numbers you get in life. It’s no wonder that adults organize second-chance proms, and that countries that never had proms have adopted the tradition.

It’s no wonder that authors like me can’t resist them.

In a novel, prom is even better than a wedding. (Slow Dance has both, by the way; I went all in.) It’s pageantry plus adolescence. You get to dress your characters up and dim the lights. You get to layer drama on top of drama on top of revelation. Who will they go with? Who will they dance with? What disco ball epiphanies await them? (Alternately: Who will stay home? Who’ll stand by the wall? Who will feel empty at the end of the night?)

Prom is a way to bring a story to a fizzy peak or a dizzy low. Shakespeare ended so many of his lighter plays with weddings only because he didn’t have prom at his disposal. 

Shiloh is right: Prom is about manufacturing sentiment. Especially in a work of fiction.

But Cary is more right, I think. Rituals like prom “allow us an outlet for actual sentiment.” They set the stage for us to feel something.

Picture of Rainbow Rowell courtesy of the author.